Embers.
Lighting a fire for all saints, all souls, unwanted words and marshmallow love.
Hello beautiful humans, as always I send my heartfelt thanks for taking precious time from your day to be here. Mere words will always feel insufficient to say how much. Know it is huge. As big as this world is beautiful.
November… do you hear a whispered sigh? Even the word feels like a mood… an intangible ambiance of ephemerality that slips between window and horizon without cabaret or announcement. There is no tender-footing as it settles between skin and bone, chilling, unfriendly but doubtless, and thankfully, preparative for la suite. A command to slow down.
“But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.”
― L.M. Montgomery
And so, I find neither reason nor rhythm in brooding, I will ignore the damp climbing the windows in condensed droplets, the cold that will surely arrive when least I am expecting it.. Somewhere on this ever beautiful blue dot there are flowers just blooming, there are people planting seeds, there are days that are warming rather than cooling where greens are greener and I know that the cycle, for our lifetimes at least, is infinite and continuing. It is enough to ease me through the thin veil that marks Samhain, enough to allow stepping to the other side of diminished light and shorter hours with graceful acceptance and a smile that it is still so.
Two weeks drizzle by in cloudy puffs of intermittent downpours arriving one after the other so quickly the sun gives up its search for a gap and sleeps. By the last days of October everything is drenched; four sheep in their soggy woollen coats, six chickens in their feathers, each separately pasted to their bodies — they look strangely like their1prehistoric ancestors — and me, carrying my mood like a shroud as I migrate from one window to another only to gaze out through yet another fog of cinereal blankets. There are days when it is so dense, the view such a soupy, viscous sea it feels like suffocation. Layers of humidity drag me under their weight, not peacefully as drowning is told to be but morosely, filled with the claustrophobia of liberty without the freedom to use it. I wonder when this mood will change, but of course, November is no month to be hurried.
That I am on half term break makes no difference to the hour I rise. Habits of a lifetime are hard to break. On a day not unlike all those preceding it I wake to a sky still coal-pit black, smudges of smokey clouds scud across visible only by their speed but through which at one point I believe I spot the moon — though after I think this may simply have been wishful thinking.
I am not to know this is the day rain ceases to fall and am entirely unenthusiastic about the necessity to drive the autoroute to Toulouse, to leave the hill and my watchful, agitated vigil in front of each of four windows in wistful hope of change. The mood has not changed, night makes itself scarce, the sky is still sitting so low on the shoulders of the hill it looks like a ghost. Leaves are still not glowing in golden crunchy carpets as they should be. No matter… I have been commandeered into delivering a piece of furniture made by my dearly beloved, its arrival long awaited by Rosie.
Seth, sleepy eyed at an unearthly hour — for him — is to accompany me. We will have need of his muscles.
To avoid the part of the journey I least want to drive, I erroneously take a route leading down into dark ravines where tiny hamlets hide like fairytales in almost total obscurity. Steep roofs sweep down over low windows, every door is made of timber so ancient I can imagine the undulations in their grain under my fingers. Late and last roses ramble up stone walls hiding carved stone lintels and mullions so vast I wonder about the calloused hands that heaved them into place. The decision adds many beautiful miles to my journey, far from feeling like lost hours, they feel like 2discovery.
Eventually, Seth and I wrestle the weighty delivery from its protective covers and ropes and endless cardboard out of the car-boot, carry it across gloomy underground parking through the reek of concrete and rubber, through two angled security doors leading to a lift — avoiding leaky pipes and seven flights of stairs — it fits but only by being turned awkwardly on its side.
Pushing it finally into place is a relief evident on each of our faces and felt yet more strongly by our aching muscles, the effort is worthy of every second as Rosie beams her beautiful smile, unable to hide delight, equal in quantity to not knowing quite whether to hug me or her brother or her new kitchen island with drawer and chopping board first!
They return, her and her bestie, with Seth and I, back to the hill she loves almost as I do. And, evidently they — or perhaps only her smile — carry the secret language of the ever cantankerous weather gods because as we pull up outside the barn, a pale sleepy sun finds a crack in the damp and the grey, through the blankets of cloud, the rain halts completely and unbelievably, not a single drop more falls during the entirety of their stay.
They bring with them, wrapped in paper and string, every word they have written through the last two years of studying, a ceremonial burning of wasted hours has been planned for the eve of All Hallows — a toasting, to the future, will be made with marshmallows dipped in hot chocolate. And, as saturated by the last ten contrary days as everything is we successfully burn through their writings, watching while their projects and their thesis’ become ashes lighter than feathers, swirl in mixed frenzies amongst the smoke in the wind from cherrywood branches, an elder, a cypress, a persimmon, all beloved, all deceased, all victims of summers violence.
Finally, exhausted by contented souls — ours and others — with cool night air falling, the thin veil that separates the months of October and November is traversed, little more than the embers of our day remain, the slightest of breezes carries them with the echos of our laughter to the dark side.
Briefly - There is a small area of no-mans-land between the lane and the river, not more than the size of a large garden. Steeply sloping, it is a tangled patch of wilderness where wild boar roam with fox and hare, stoat and weasel. Where teasels fight with burdock and yarrow and lichen is luminous all year round. Rarely human feet venture within. I notice, on a pastel coloured evening — it is many months since I have walked even the boundary — that what was understory has become overstory. Small trees are visible from the lane.
Whilst clearing and laying dead and decaying plants back onto — and into — my wild garden I hit a stone with the sharp edge of the spade. As I pull it from the earth it splits, falling into two parts in my hands... hidden inside is a fern as ancient as the hill itself. Older. I hold it thinking a piece of history is laying in my hands which may have been stamped to the ground by the prehistoric relatives of my chickens, how utterly extraordinary!
I am driving through the valley on an errand for a friend. Over the half-bridge, all that remains after the last vicious storm felled one of three old oaks on its iron railings. Across the waters of the Riou Viou churning in muddy leaf filled swirls beneath, then climbing as I begin the divine assent through copper leafed beeches turning ever more quickly towards winter. Here, I see no sky at all through the canopies of leaves, only flickers of light at the will of the wind. I only emerge into full light again as I turn the second of three sharp bends. On the last stretch before the brow of this hill that is not my own I am accosted by an extraordinarily wondrous grey and violet murmuration of pigeons. Their balletic movements are hypnotic, I pull up in the middle of the lane — because I can here — stare, open mouthed in awe back across the sweeping vista between the two hills until they disappear, my camera forgotten in my hands, unused.
Sometimes, one second of looking away is too many.
Also, sometimes — though I believe in no god other than the cantankerous lot that deal out the weather — I believe in praying. It feels like acknowledgement, an understanding — only marginally better than silence — that there are too many hundreds of thousands of people in the world who suffer far greater misfortunes than I have ever suffered, and, they suffer daily.
With forever love
Lin Gregory explains beautifully about the 3Ogham. This is a wonderful read highlighted by stunning photos from Wakehurst Place which almost backed onto the garden of my childhood home.
It’s believed the Tree Ogham (pronounced Oh-am), or the Celtic Tree Alphabet as it’s sometimes known, developed from script brought to this country by Celtic tribes around 600BC. Although there was no written record then, it’s found on stones across Ireland and parts of Britain. Legend has it that Ogma the Celtic god of learning wanted to give man a sacred way of communicating, creating a mystical language of nature and spirit.
Research carried out in 2008 showed for the first time that certain dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens. So while they are clearly not untamed and ferocious beasts — er… some are, I have the scars to prove it — they do seem to be Tyrannosaurus rex’s closest living relative.
The joys of being lost in France are countless, a fact I have always maintained, even when it means arriving far later than expected.
For further fascinating reading; https://monumentalireland.ie/ogham-stones/
You describe moody, gloomy, and drizzly November so well, Susie, and the power of Rosie’s smile (or so it seems) to call out the sun from behind the clouds, so the cantankerous weather gods finally grant a few days of respite to le Paradis, celebrating the burning of all that requisite paperwork, with marshmallows melted on a cherry wood fire (the combination must be a seductive aroma) and feeling the connection between those squishy melted confection-clouds and love – perhaps not so strange when dipped in chocolate as well.
And to find that prehistoric fern! Truly extraordinary.
Thank you so much for sharing these melancholic and magical moments with your extraordinary gift for evoking enchantment even from the most drenched and dreary furs, feathers and fronds 🙏 🪶 🤍
Wow I feel quite Novembered now :) I love that moment when you (one) stare/s at the sheer scrumptious beauty of things. Nice.